It’s not the technology it’s the culture behind it. the same was said about TV. American mainstream consumerist culture is the cancer,
Streaming music was available back in the 1970s. It consisted of you and your friends sitting on the floor with an AM radio and a portable cassette recorder and hoping the local station would play your song you wanted to hear and record. And IF your timing was right, you could get the whole song recorded. All so you could play it back on that cheap tinny sounding recorder. Such recordings were often used as a gift to your latest girl/boy friend with “Our Song” on it.
Hmm. 1970 is a little early for a kid to have a portable cassette recorder. Transistor radios were just getting affordable enough to give a kid.
Tunes in a TV stream…
In 1970, I’d get home from kindergarten and watch Mr. Rogers in B&W. My mom didn’t like color TVs for a long time because the colors were “wrong”–she was an artist, a painter. So, we didn’t have a color TV till the mid-70s when she saw a Sony TV and decided the color was okay.
EDIT: I don’t like that Lemmy is changing my double hyphen (--) to an en-dash. I guess I’ll need to escape it from now on. I don’t like being tagged as AI, when I’m clearly just an old-school non-AI bot.
I still dont stream. I buy big hard drives and full them with stuff. :)
Veronica is the best!
And so, are you *cue theme tune
I wish I had a cool aunt like Veronica.
20 years ago…
Even YouTube was around by that point.
You could stream 144p6 video with phone-like audio with a RealPlayer browser plugin and a 28k modem in 1998. Very few websites served video but some TV channels were available live like this, maybe also in 240p15 at double the bitrate with a luxury 56k modem or ISDN. Viewers with slower modems could often download such videos as VODs (depending on copyright because those didn’t have RealPlayer DRM) as WMV (with Microsoft’s proprietary codec better than MPEG-2) or AVI (as MPEG-2 so you could burn it onto a CD and view on a DVD player but it’s unlikely you’d have a big disk and CD burner but processor too slow for that video). DVD-quality video (high bitrate 480p30/480i60/480p24/576p25/576i60, now considered low-end for movies) only became available to stream about 10 years later.
Pretty sure Pandora was around. But also I’d consider cable and satellite TV to be streaming services.
Tapes , lots and lots of them

57 years ago (1969) meant the only tapes were audio (8-tracks, reel to reel, and some cassette tapes), and those were just starting to become popular because Dolby (released in '65) was slowly starting to be used during mastering to reduce tape hiss enough that they could be used for music.
Betamax was released in '75, VHS in '76.
Umatic came out in 1971. But it was too expensive for most consumers. My brother in law had one because his family business was TV repair.
Philips started with cassettapes in my country Belgium in 63 , betamax and vhs where for video.
8 mm camera and movies were also availabledeleted by creator
Uhm and what about Tapes for Data Storage? Pretty sure Mainframes existed in 1969 already.
I’m mean you had reel to reel. Which was a tape right, just not a cassette?
And Film/Movies/TV Shows were also distributed as Tape Reels.
My grandpa recorded absolutely everything on VHS in the 90s. He had so many bookshelves full of movies and shows he meticulously catalogued. I wanted to ask him if he ever actually watched any of them, but I didn’t want to break his spirit.
OK, thanks iam that old, the years 70 and 80 where the best times to be around ,talk to your grandfather ,ask him everything about that time
I will give it a shot for the tapes my parents have in the Attic
I also don’t stream, they’re all played locally. But my music taste is also conservative, I don’t easily like new songs, I just keep listening the same few albums for years.
Stream? Yeah I go down by the stream often
on whom?
I live in a van near one (this generation’s dream.).
I’d give anything for a steady diet of government cheese…

This gif is perfect, I was listening to a song, then it finished and went to the next one, and in both his punches were completely synced to the beat both times
I stream from self hosted sources, best of all worlds. No enshitification.
New media is acquired for free from the public libraries and then ripped, which under my local laws is perfectly legal.
I mean, any YouTube creator is neck-deep in streaming. It’s probably more unhealthy than long-form TV.
EDIT: Though to this influencer’s credit, she seems more low key and avoids other social media. It appears she only does YT, Patreon, Ko-Fi, Peertube(!) and her own site, and uploads on a modest scheduile. That’s quite reasonable.
Honestly super big props to this influencer for uploading a video about cutting out all streaming services 37 years before Netflix even started trying to pivot towards internet streaming!
She looks more like weird Al than Jack Black looks like meatloaf.
Removed by mod
I guess people sit all day and stream stuff, because you cant do hobbies like dance, yoga, bicycle or anything else looool.
Yeah most people dont have the energy for those things, but its by design. Work and family takes all your energy. And then they want you to watch tv so you can get served ads, or watch news so you feel small and afraid.
work and family is excluded, for obvious reasons.











